Aerial Game -- good rules?

[takyris]

Hi, I'm the GM who was worried that the PCs had access to grenades at 2nd level. Really, what I should have been worried about was the fact that they had access to an enormous room that was autospawning bad guys. After an effective TPK (enough PCs killed that campaign is over, and the 2 survivors go off to desk jobs), I'm getting ready to start a new campaign.

I've got some time and leeway, because other players have stepped up to give me a chance to play. Here's the campaign concept I was thinking of:

Take a world with higher air pressure and a smaller gravitational pull, taking it to the point where, because of both of these factors, human-powered flight is genuinely viable. It was a colony world, but has now fallen into relative barbarism -- feudal monarchy has arisen. Peasants fight with spears or clubs on the ground, while nobles soar through the sky on crystal wings (an effectively weightless aerogel), dueling with razor-sharp wingtips and blades fixed to their ankles.

Most of what I want can be taken care of with simple rules -- a new type of weapon proficiency for weapons used with the feet, a few new weapons, and so on -- but what I really need are good, solid, simple flying rules. I was never a fan of the core D&D flying rules -- they were bulky and crude and really just there for the few times when people were in the air. Is there anything that handles altitude changes well, as well as the greater distances handled during flight-fights?

 

[JPL]

Hi, I'm the GM who was worried that the PCs had access to grenades at 2nd level. Really, what I should have been worried about was the fact that they had access to an enormous room that was autospawning bad guys. After an effective TPK (enough PCs killed that campaign is over, and the 2 survivors go off to desk jobs), I'm getting ready to start a new campaign.

I've got some time and leeway, because other players have stepped up to give me a chance to play. Here's the campaign concept I was thinking of:

Take a world with higher air pressure and a smaller gravitational pull, taking it to the point where, because of both of these factors, human-powered flight is genuinely viable. It was a colony world, but has now fallen into relative barbarism -- feudal monarchy has arisen. Peasants fight with spears or clubs on the ground, while nobles soar through the sky on crystal wings (an effectively weightless aerogel), dueling with razor-sharp wingtips and blades fixed to their ankles.

Most of what I want can be taken care of with simple rules -- a new type of weapon proficiency for weapons used with the feet, a few new weapons, and so on -- but what I really need are good, solid, simple flying rules. I was never a fan of the core D&D flying rules -- they were bulky and crude and really just there for the few times when people were in the air. Is there anything that handles altitude changes well, as well as the greater distances handled during flight-fights?

I was just thinking about this in preparation for an upcoming pulp game.

First instinct would be to use the rules from Star Wars...first edition, in my case.

I just don't think anything but a highly abstract system would work. There's just no effective way to plot relative location in three dimensions while taking into account variable speed and manuverability and the laws of physics.

 

[takyris]

Was talking about this with one of my players, and we came up with something like:

1) Not exactly 3-D -- instead, use different levels, and declare that climbing up one level is a full-round action, while swooping down is a move (usually as part of a charge)

2) Establish some mechanic by which people who are at the "same level" can either be above or below each other, establishing a "higher ground" -- you can establish higher ground by taking a move action to do so, and if both people try to do so, neither one gets higher ground. You still don't gain an altitude level unless you actually spend the full-round action to go up there, though -- the different altitude levels correspond to levels where updrafts or wind currents make flight reasonably easy, and you don't get there unless you're really trying.

3) While most move-and-attack stuff can be handled via handwaving, with people swooping back and forth as they fly, I want to establish a "glide" mechanic that allows someone to continue to move at normal speed (ie, not hustle speed) as a free action, provided that they were moving at least half-their movement rate in that direction last turn. Doing this lets them take other actions, but they lose higher ground if they had it, drop to lower ground if they were even, and are still stuck at lower ground if that's where they were already. A feat like "Improved Glide" might make this better.

4) Need to establish rules for what happens when people's wings get injured -- how to break them, how to recover, and so forth. At the least, a Fly check when you get hit (Fly replaces Drive as a skill, here) in order to maintain control.

Yeah, increasingly thinking I should just make this up myself, in case you hadn't noticed.

 

[JPL]

I seem to recall thinking that the Star Wars system would work pretty well for fighter plane dogfights...

"Crimson Skies: The RPG" would be fun, I think.

 

[ledded]

Was talking about this with one of my players, and we came up with something like:

1) Not exactly 3-D -- instead, use different levels, and declare that climbing up one level is a full-round action, while swooping down is a move (usually as part of a charge)

2) Establish some mechanic by which people who are at the "same level" can either be above or below each other, establishing a "higher ground" -- you can establish higher ground by taking a move action to do so, and if both people try to do so, neither one gets higher ground. You still don't gain an altitude level unless you actually spend the full-round action to go up there, though -- the different altitude levels correspond to levels where updrafts or wind currents make flight reasonably easy, and you don't get there unless you're really trying.

3) While most move-and-attack stuff can be handled via handwaving, with people swooping back and forth as they fly, I want to establish a "glide" mechanic that allows someone to continue to move at normal speed (ie, not hustle speed) as a free action, provided that they were moving at least half-their movement rate in that direction last turn. Doing this lets them take other actions, but they lose higher ground if they had it, drop to lower ground if they were even, and are still stuck at lower ground if that's where they were already. A feat like "Improved Glide" might make this better.

4) Need to establish rules for what happens when people's wings get injured -- how to break them, how to recover, and so forth. At the least, a Fly check when you get hit (Fly replaces Drive as a skill, here) in order to maintain control.

Yeah, increasingly thinking I should just make this up myself, in case you hadn't noticed.

Not to sound like the raven or anything, but Star Wars (revised) did have a decent system for this which worked out pretty well for us, once we modified it with a few suggestions from SW Gamer mag and a few house rules we liked.

It helped that we had a crude but effective system to work with the miniatures we had. I would suggest a simple mechanic for relative height, maybe in ranges (PB, close, medium, far, extreme?) and to make it easy require a certain speed category (or minimum distance travelled) to overcome multiple ranges (for instance, moving at a 'hustle' can allow you to close 2 range categories, such as from medium to PB, or just require that moving 100' allows you to move 2 range categories, etc). Just an idea to keep you from having to measure every little thing. Handling acceleration/velocity can be a bit unrealistic with this kind of system; you can 'swoop down' a lot easier than 'swoop up' when gliding without propulsion, depending on the conditions (thermals drafts, etc) but this doesnt really take it into effect.

On the gliding thing: For powered craft just continuing in one direction and doing not much else in the way of piloting/driving/flying was a free action; it isnt that hard to do for a speeder or whatever, and it allowed the pilot to make a full attack if he wasnt busy juking or evading. With the gliders, like you said I'd combine it with a loss of altitude but allow them to maintain their last speed (unless you envision some reason for the loss of airspeed; I'm not sure how your propulsion works out). Of course this is a good way to get jacked in a 3D world, unless of course you have a player who is so *&^% good that he can shoot down homing missles before they get to his ship (darn you, Pierceatwork!).

 

[Pierce]

Good, lucky, whatever. All I know is that one round there were two missles coming down on us - the next round, there was one.

One rule of thumb we use for characters climbing stairs is 30' movement = 20' up stairs. You could adapt something akin to this for a quick and dirty system: a flyer may move x on a level plane, x * .75 and rise by z, or x * 1.5 and dive by z. You'd need to adjust the z factor as appropriate, but it's a start. I should say that I have very little experience with any systems which may already be out there - SW being the only time I've been in combat whilst flying recently and then I was merely a gunner. And apparently a very good one

 

[ThoughtBubble]

Tacky, why do you always come up with cool ideas that get me up and running on another new campaign concept?

 

[takyris]

Heh. Glad to be a muse, or at least amusing, ThoughtBubble.

As it is, I'm still trying to get a handle on it. I haven't loved anything I've researched, so for me, it's a choice between trying to kludge the existing rules and trying to make up some elegant and simple system that will do what I want.

The concept of dueling nobles soaring through the skies while secret societs devoted to the rediscovery of the circuit meet in underground caverns is one that I'm liking, though.

 

[ThoughtBubble]

You found anything that takes into account wind direction?

 

[The Goblin King]

Take a world with higher air pressure and a smaller gravitational pull, taking it to the point where, because of both of these factors, human-powered flight is genuinely viable. It was a colony world, but has now fallen into relative barbarism -- feudal monarchy has arisen. Peasants fight with spears or clubs on the ground, while nobles soar through the sky on crystal wings (an effectively weightless aerogel), dueling with razor-sharp wingtips and blades fixed to their ankles.

I can't help you with the flying rules but I had another evil idea. What happens when one of these disgruntled peasants invents the bola? Lots of dead nobles.

Another nasty weapon against fliers is the spear thrower. Made from a Y shaped piece of wood or an animals antler these increase the range a person can fire a spear. Note that both of these are Stone Age inventions that were largely abandoned because bows are superior.

Another thought which occurs to me. If humans can fly so easily, there are probably a lot of flying animals too. I don't know exactly what you planned for the world but if you made the planet an analog of the late Cretaceous period it would add to the barbarian motif. Pterosaurs and Giant birds would be common. I could even imagine some being tamed and used as mounts.